We often ask executives to tell us about their biggest innovation failures. A recent example is disconcertingly typical.

In interviews with a dozen senior managers from a large company, two particular failures came up over and over again. Clearly the company was painfully aware of these two failed projects. The problem came with the follow-up question, “Why did example A fail?”

The CEO and CFO responded with, “A failure to hit ROI and NPV targets.” The head of R&D remembered it as a failure to properly market the innovation. The Chief Marketing Officer recalled that sales and distribution did not achieve planned market presence. The disturbing pattern here wasn’t that the failure had occurred, but that there was no consensus at all, no common understanding from which to learn. The company had never analyzed the failure, learned from it, and socialized that learning.

If we are going to learn from failure, we have to do so with intention. Here are a few ideas for enhancing your success tomorrow by learning from yesterday’s failures:

Conduct objective post-mortems. If an innovation initiative failed, ask why. Simple answers don’t count. To state that it didn’t hit ROI, or whatever the metric is, doesn’t answer the question. What part of the strategy, or the tactical execution, failed? Why, and how does this help us be more successful in future efforts?

Create a knowledge management system. Store data on your failures, it will be useful in analyzing why and avoiding the same mistakes in the future.

Triage the failures. If you do, they might actually come back as successes in the future. In an earlier post, we set out a three-part framework for innovation success: track three kinds of failures (misalignment with corporate will, with current capabilities or technologies, or with market needs/dynamics). When underlying conditions change, these “failures” might become successes.

Introduce Celebrating Failure Day. We can’t learn, or turn failures into successes if we put them completely behind us. We need a mechanism for stimulating that learning. On one particular day, set aside time to learn from a mistake.

We just wish that Santayana’s noted aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” wasn’t a cliché describing our disposable society, including our disposable knowledge.